Saturday, 24 October 2009

Labour's malice and Griffin's gain

There is a streak of malice and spite in Labour administrations that is largely absent from the centre-right. Few Conservative councils would sell-off council estate football pitches to a golf club to 'teach them a lesson', yet Labour councils do this all the time; show them an articulate right-voting middle-class enclave and their instinct is to impose a prison hostel, a drug rehab unit or an asylum seekers centre on it in a spiteful and malicious attempt to 'teach them a lesson'. It comes as no surprise that they do this on a national as well as a local scale, and that this malice also underlaid Labour's abolition of border controls from 2000 onwards. Andrew Neather, a pivotal figure in New Labour's policy, now admits that Labour engineered mass immigration to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity'.

In a spectacular own-goal, however, it was not 'the Right' that had their noses rubbed in Labour's faecal spite, but their own core voters; as Charles Moore writes in the Telegraph

Ten years ago, a self-employed painter and decorator in, say, Barking might have earned £120 a day, enough to get a reasonable mortgage and sustain a modestly secure family life. Today, after the Government underestimated the number of Eastern Europeans likely to come here by almost 20 times, he would get £70 or £80. If his ailing father pays regular visits to hospital, he may be denied a bed because so many foreign women are giving birth. If his child has special needs, he may find the local school neglects them because it is desperately trying to teach English to children who do not speak it at home. If his brother is a soldier, he may return from risking his life to be insulted on the streets of his country by people who hate it.

The strongest common characteristic of such BNP supporters is pessimism. They feel they are sinking to the bottom of the pile, and that people from other countries are being privileged over them by the public services. If they complain, they are told they are racist. It is not surprising that they say things like "My country is being taken away from me". They are not completely mistaken.

Anyone who has employed inarticulate unskilled white working class labour will be sensitive in avoiding the key provocations; talking down to them, being too clever and above all taking advantage of their inability to frame arguments even when they know they're right. When the carefully designed QT panel and audience did all of this to the clumsy and inarticulate Nick Griffin on Thursday watched by 8m voters they scored another spectacular home goal.

More than half of those questioned said they agreed with the BNP, or thought that it “had a point” in wishing to “speak up for the interests of the indigenous, white British people ... which successive governments have done far too little to protect.”

This included 43 per cent who said that, while they shared some of its concerns, they had “no sympathy for the party itself”.

And there you have it; a substantial voter base who are not racist, who have ethnic minority workmates and family members, generally tolerant and easy-going and who would disagree with the BNP's underlying loathsomeness but for whom Labour's immigration malice and Cameron's smug refusal to get involved have driven to lending a vote to Griffin.

3 comments:

Brian E.
said...

I live in a constituency where the Tory MP has one of the biggest majorities in the country, and thus our MP is selected by a mere few hundred people belonging to the local party and there is no point in my bothering to vote. But if I lived in one of those traditional working class Labour constituencies where there was a chance of my vote having some meaning, I would certainly vote BNP, not because I support them, but because I would see it as the only way perhaps getting some change.I suspect it was very similar thinking, albeit for religious rather than racist reasons, that led to the rise of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland since 1945. Let's hope that the BNP doesn't grow in the same way.